Four Beauties and the Judge by Haran ChoiMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Four Beauties and the Judge is billed as a children's story, a label I remain unsure about. Haran Choi has penned a story of four beautiful (and rather narcissistic) young women who find themselves in the Underworld after falling for a trick scripted by Death. Their lives on Earth as servants to various Emperors in China are judged by a monkey judge named Hu to decide who among them would ascend to the Sky Lounge. What follows is a bizarre beauty pageant with a 'tribal council' feel to the outcome.
The moral of the story is inner beauty is more important than outer but the path to that is a troubled one. There was so much that went unexplained and I felt like if things shouldn't be named if not explained to some extent. There were many places in the book where quotation marks were backwards and oddly placed, missing spaces between words and large spaces between others. Perhaps that was due to formatting rather than author mistake but it irritated me either way.
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